Abstract
The article presents the possibility of using language corpora in foreign language teaching mainly in teaching Czech as foreign language and partly in teaching Polish and English. The first part is focused on basic information about language corpora and Data-Driven Learning (DDL), a method which uses corpus data in language teaching.
DDL was first used by British linguist Tim Johns, who used language corpus in work with student of English. DDL is divided traditionally into two branches: a) direct use of corpus in teaching, b) indirect use in teaching - preparing materials based on corpus data.
The author briefly presents the application of this method in the Czech Republic and Poland. The second part is devoted to the tools used in work with corpus data.
There are applications for Czech such as SyD and Treq being developed at the Institute of the Czech National Corpus at Charles University and tool Skell for English and also corpus browsers PELCRA and PoliCarp for Polish. The third part presents concrete exercises for students which can be used during the class.
In summary the author points out that corpus specialists who deal with the education of both teacher and students play a crucial role in the use of language corpora in foreign language teaching. It is also worth emphasizing the wide use of language corpora not only in foreign language teaching but also in teaching of the mother tongue as well, which may already prove useful in primary schools.